Rosenrot video

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Premiere: 30. November, 2005 (MTV Rockzone)

Shoot date: November 2005
Shoot place: the Carpathians, Romania
Directed by: Zoran Bihac
Album: Rosenrot

Description: The video shows the band as monks that go to a feast in a small village. The main ‘story’ of the video shows the band’s vocalist Till Lindemann falling in love with one of the girls in the village. At her request, he enters her house and murders her parents. As he leaves the house, he smiles to the girl and she smiles back briefly, before crying out, at which the villagers rush Till from the darkness and beat him. They tie him up and burn him on a stake; Till’s fellow monks and his lover participate in the execution by throwing burning brands onto the woodpile.

The plot mirrors the song’s lyrics: in both the video and the song, a man is asked to commit a self-destructive yet pointless act by his lover, and dies in the attempt while she is unharmed. In the video the man commits murder and is executed; in the song he attempts to retrieve a rose from a mountain, and falls to his death.

Throughout the video footage is shown of the band flagellating themselves with whips. The priests, Till in particular, are seen to be in emotional torment as the people of the villiage they visit are unfussed with emotional or physical pleasure; the townsfolk are often seen drinking and dancing. The stricter priests feel love, lust, and gluttony, and they are seen whipping themselves with knotted ropes as penance. The irony of this is that once one of the priests has come to terms with his love and feels no guilt, he is killed for the murders he committed. Similar irony is seen in the video for Ich will, where a bank robbery is rewarded by media attention; hypocritical justice is a common theme in Rammstein’s videos.